Wu Long carried the unconscious beauty to the nearest available room and lay her down. His eyes flashed with profound patterns and after he washed his hands with a towel he drenched in some drinking water and soap, he took out several golden needles as well as some jade needles.
The needles went through the clothes and were placed into specific spots on her body, as he closed his eyes and placed his hand on her abdomen. Spiritual Qi was coursing through his hand and his other hand was placed in a hand seal.
Soon, a black and slimy, foul-smelling liquid started seeping out of her body along the needles and accumulating in little droplets suspended above them. The hand seal changed and the liquid all gathered into one small ball in front of Wu Long’s hand, which then compressed and coagulated, becoming a black ball that fell onto the hand as he released the hand seal and stretched it to catch the ball.
He discarded the ball while removing the needles from her body and then fed her a few pills he took out from his spatial ring. He pressed certain points on her upper chest and lower neck with Spiritual Qi running atop his fingers in thin streams to trigger the swallowing reaction.
Now that she was stabilized he cleaned up his appearance a little more as a completely bloodied man was probably not something this beauty would want to see first when she woke up.
“Mmn”
A few minutes later she mumbled and her eyelids began to tremble. The beauty opened her eyes in a daze, but as soon as a light of reason appeared in them, she jolted her body up into a seating position, caution in her expression and mannerisms.
She saw a handsome young man standing a bit further away from her with crossed arms and looking at her with interest.
“…”
Her eyes narrowed and her muscles contracted in preparation to move at first thought, but a smile appeared on the young man’s face as he raised both hands up on the sides, causing her to questionably look at him, not lowering her guard or relaxing her tense muscles.
“I am not one of the people who kept you captive”
He said, to which a light “hmph” escaped her lips.
“You think I will believe you just because you say so?”
“It is up to you whether to believe me, but let’s not fight until you make sure”
He replied to her with a charming smile. She was silent for a minute but then slowly nodded as the situation was too unclear to make rush moves. There seemed to be no malice in him, although she did not lower her guard. And she felt no presence of anyone else in a large area around. Her head was surprisingly completely clear despite how heavily drugged she was before.
“Do you know where you are?”
“…vaguely…Sullen Monster Palisade?”
“Heh, close enough, this place used to be called Supreme Master Pavilion”
He replied with a slight chuckle at the name she vaguely recognized in her disoriented drugged frenzy.
“Supreme Master Pavilion?!?! I am in Tingren Kingdom?” 𝑜𝘷𝑙.𝘰𝑟𝑔
“Correct”, Wu Long nodded, as she tried to digest this seemingly shocking revelation to her. She shuddered at the thought of what her fate could be.
“…Used to? What is it called now?”
“It has no name now”
Wu Long said as she looked at him in confusion.
“All the occupants died…well… dying”
He added, as there were still some that are being killed by Shen Min. She did not leave the ruins of the gate, so she was not currently engaged with them since no one approaches the area now. There are still people in the sect, but they are like rats stuck on a sinking ship in the middle of the ocean, running around, trying to find the safest place that does not exist.
She now noticed that his clothes were covered with blood stains all over. It was not noticeable at first glance since he wore plain black robes, but now that she looked closer he was basically bathed in blood except for his head from the neck up and arms from the elbows down.
Her pupils shrank and she upped her level of alert towards him.
“You…”
“Correct, I came here to kill them”
“…”
She looked at him, and the more she thought about the situation the more plausible it looked. She was free of shackles and her mind was free of drugs. There were no presences around for as far as she could sense, and as her spiritual sense spread out she found corpses of disciples that tried to take her away earlier not far from this room.
“…”
She still did not lower his guard against him but she acknowledged that he might be speaking the truth. There was one thing that was inconsistent.
“Where are your superiors?”
“I have none”
“You are only at the Qi Condensation Realm, are you saying you lead the group that attacked and destroyed a sect as powerful as the Supreme Master Pavilion?”
“I came with one companion, she is in Revolving Qi Realm”
She looked at him for some time in silence. There was no way he was speaking the truth but she could not figure out his motive in telling such a lie.
“It does not matter whether you believe me or not, what matters is that I do not have any intentions to harm you. I removed the toxins from you and fed you some medicine so you should be able to move around. The process even took out some of the impurities so you should be able to cross your next bottleneck in cultivation with more ease.
Now that you are awake, I can leave you to figure out what you want to do on your own…that is if you are not overwhelmed with gratitude and rush into my embrace with tears of joy”
He said, and she looked at him slightly dazed for a moment, and then a cold expression appeared on her face.
“You-…”
“Hahaha, relax, I’m joking”
As she wanted to warn him if he had any weird thoughts Wu Long laughed and raised his hands in a sign of innocence. There was a charming smile on his face as he then laughed and then turned to move to the door.
“…Where are you going?”
She asked after some moments of adjusting, as his joke completely broke the solemn atmosphere. He was nonchalant from the beginning, but still, the conversation was largely on topic. The surprise turn left her struggling for a response.
“I still need to clean up the remnants and it seems I have recently inherited quite the wealth, so I need to go collect it”
He said not stopping his legs or turning, as he opened the door and just left. She looked at the place he disappeared to in a daze, dumbfounded and a little lost on what to do now that he just left her like that.
—
Wu Long went around the sect, gathering spatial rings and storing anything valuable to him. As the spatial rings started to accumulate, since a spatial ring cannot be placed in a spatial ring, he transferred everything of value to him to the better quality ones and discarded the inferior ones.
He also visited the treasury, armory, and any storehouses, the dwellings that seemed to belong to important people, and halls of various departments, collecting the generous inheritance and cleaning up any remnants of the sect members.
While visiting he was also helping the women out of captivity. He inherited a lot of medicine so he alleviated some of their poor conditions and had them slowly gather at the sect’s medicine halls. There were those whose condition was relatively better so they helped others as they slowly started to assemble and organize.
He did not count but even if he did he would lose the count of times he heard words of gratitude, relief, and worship.
The whole process was very long as night fell and a new day started since there really was too much to inherit. As it was starting to go over what he and Shen Min could comfortably carry around he let the women collect the rest as he already took everything useful to him. Some of them had nowhere to return so they would need some funds to survive the first couple of months. It could be seen that some of them would probably stay grouped up as a new community when they left here, while others would try to return to wherever they were from or simply travel someplace to start a new life.
He taught the newly appeared leaders of the women knowledge on how to improve their conditions, and what medicine may be helpful for their recovery.
He then led an army of armed women with decent cultivation levels who had the strength and ability to move to a place where the last remnant members of the Supreme Master Pavilion were gathered. They were cooped up in a hidden shelter underneath a distant pavilion, hoping that the disaster would pass. As they despairingly prepared for a desperate last stand, Wu Long’s sword flickered with a reflection of the light from the lanterns illuminating the shelter, and all of their weapons were clearly cut, as well as gashes appeared on their wrists and a menacing army of women started to close in on them.